Rate My Professor Rebecca Vandeleur

Dr. Rebecca Vandeleur is affiliated with the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine in the College of Sciences at the University of Adelaide. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Adelaide between 2003 and 2008, supervised principally by Professor Stephen Tyerman. Her PhD thesis, titled "Grapevine Root Hydraulics: The Role of Aquaporins," investigated the mechanisms of water transport in grapevine roots mediated by aquaporins.

Dr. Vandeleur's research specializes in plant water relations, focusing on aquaporins and hydraulic conductivity in roots and petioles, particularly under drought and diurnal conditions in grapevines. Her key publications include "The Role of Plasma Membrane Intrinsic Protein Aquaporins in Water Transport through Roots: Diurnal and Drought Stress Responses Reveal Different Strategies between Isohydric and Anisohydric Cultivars of Grapevine" (Plant Physiology, 2009), "A Comparison of Petiole Hydraulics and Aquaporin Expression in an Anisohydric and Isohydric Grapevine" (Frontiers in Plant Science, 2017), "Rapid Shoot-to-Root Signalling Regulates Root Hydraulic Conductance via Aquaporins" (Plant, Cell & Environment, 2014), and "Roles of Aquaporins in Root Responses to Irrigation" (Plant and Soil, 2005). She contributed to a Wine Australia project on vine carbohydrate dynamics and source-sink relationships (2006). Her work, conducted within the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, has informed understandings of crop water use efficiency and stress tolerance.

In her career at the University of Adelaide, Dr. Vandeleur worked as a postdoctoral researcher measuring water flow rates in plant root cells. She held the position of Executive Officer at the Waite Research Institute in 2021 and Operations and Research Manager (0.8 FTE) in 2022, supporting research in agriculture, food, and wine. She currently serves as Plants for Space SA Node Coordinator for the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space at the Plant Research Centre.